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Craige: Everybody's talking

One morning not long ago I awoke to the extremely loud call of a cardinal. It sounded as if the bird were in my house. Well, a bird was — but not a cardinal. My African grey parrot Cosmo was spiritedly mimicking the wild avian inhabitants of our woods.

Then “BEEP...BEEP...BEEP...BEEP.” Whoa! What was that? Oh, yes, a truck backing up.

Finally I heard, in my voice, “I’m HERE! Come here! Cosmo wanna go up!” I got up and let Cosmo out of her cage.

Cosmo is a superb mimic. She must have superb hearing.

Birds’ hearing generally is far more acute than human hearing. Some researchers describe it as “more detailed.” Birds can distinguish sounds from each other that blend together for us humans — unless we record and analyze them electronically. They can discriminate not only a huge variety of calls from different birds, but also different calls from the same bird.

Cosmo fooled me into thinking I had a cardinal in my house, but she probably didn’t fool the cardinal’s mate. And she probably didn’t understand what the cardinal was saying to his mate.

According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Northern Cardinal has some 16 different calls for different purposes — for locating his mate, for sounding an alarm, for warning intruders on his territory, etc. And cardinals have regional accents! Like us humans.

Researchers have only recently discovered that every single animal on our planet has a unique voice. And, by studying sound spectographs of their calls, researchers have concluded that many, many animals, both avian and mammalian, have different calls appropriate to different situations.

Those who have regional accents must do some learning from each other. And they must hear very well.

Crows, almost universally exalted for their high intelligence, vary their calls according to what they want to say. They have calls to signal alarm, distress and the desire to get together. Crows from different regions, having different accents, may or may not understand each other.

Whales likewise communicate with a system of vocal signals, and whales in different regions of the ocean have different dialects. The enormous blue whales, who vocalize at frequencies too low for humans to hear, use sound to navigate, find a mate and alert each other about food sources. Their signals can travel a thousand miles through the water.

When the male and female whales get together, they may discover they have different accents.

Now we’re learning from Dr. Con Slobodchikoff at Northern Arizona University that prairie dogs talk with each other and have regional dialects. He and his students have decoded the alarm calls of Gunnison’s Prairie Dogs and found that the prairie dogs emit different alarm calls for different predators — for coyotes, for dogs, for hawks, for humans, for example. The prairie dogs even vary their alarm calls to give physical descriptions of the predators. Slobodchikoff claims that their calls are like short sentences made of nouns and adjectives.

Everybody’s talking! And we humans used to think we were the only ones.

But can the birds hear each other over the sound of trucks? Can the whales hear each other over the sound of cruise ships, cargo ships, submarines and aircraft carriers?

Noise pollution doesn’t stop humans from making babies, but it may stop some of our planet’s other communicative creatures.

To Cosmo, the sound of a truck backing up is not noise pollution. The truck’s beeps — and the other sounds we industrious humans make with our machines — are noise pollution only to those of us who remember or can imagine a time or a place without trucks, trains, ships or planes.

Does a 90-year-old blue whale remember a time when it heard no ships?

For 10-year-old Cosmo, the sound of a truck is as normal a part of her world as the sound of a cardinal.

It’s time for Cosmo to go to bed. After spending an hour speaking enthusiastically about feathers, fur, doggies and birdies, interrupting her own monologue with barks and hoots and beeps and cheeps, quiet chuckles and raucous laughs, Cosmo just told me: “Cosmo wanna cuddle. Cosmo wanna go to bed!”

But as I approached her, she raised her left foot and asked, “Betty Jean wanna kiss feet?”

I let her wrap her four toes around my nose. She chuckled. “Hehehehe.” Then with her beak she yanked an earring off my left ear.

I’ll search for it after I put Cosmo to bed.

• Betty Jean Craige is professor emerita of comparative literature at the University of Georgia and the author of many books, including “Conversations with Cosmo: At Home with an African Grey Parrot” (2010). Her email is bettyjean@cosmotalks.com. Cosmo’s website is www.cosmotalks.com.

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